Celebrity Rumors

Gossip Cop was founded in 2009 to bust celebrity rumors. In a nutshell, celebrity rumors are unsubstantiated claims about famous people that are published online and in print or air on TV. And on a daily basis, we spend our days and nights verifying whether the claims are fact or fiction.

Our staff regularly combs through tabloids, magazines, newspapers, blogs and websites looking for celebrity rumors to investigate. If something appears suspicious, we then fact-check the claims to determine what’s real and what’s rumor. To this day, we remain the only outlet that’s solely dedicated to looking into what’s true and what’s false in entertainment news.

Each week, Gossip Cop takes a deep dive into the pages of the National Enquirer, Star, Us Weekly, OK!, Life & Style and In Touch to review the content. Any questionable material is closely examined with the goal of verifying or debunking the claims. The same approach is taken every day with online outlets, such as HollywoodLife, RadarOnline, MediaTakeOut and Celebrity Insider.

Gossip Cop keeps track of our debunkings in order to determine how many times a month and a year a given media organization has been busted for spreading untrue celebrity rumors. Based on that tally, we are able to conclude which publications are the worst offenders. In 2015, we corrected OK! more than any other publication, counting both print and digital outlets. In 2016, the tabloid was surpassed by its sister magazine, the National Enquirer. And in 2017, HollywoodLife led our tabloid scorecard with 643 corrections in that calendar year.

In recent years, Gossip Cop has expanded our mission to not just inform readers what’s true and what’s false, but to also expose what is fabricated and fake. Even arguably positive stories need to be called out if they are made-up. By doing so, we strive to present information that is both accurate and credible.

Among the latest trends is for certain sites to take real news and twist it into fake news by manufacturing a related angle. This is done to exploit popular topics and thereby capitalize on potential traffic through social media and search engines. In a sense, it is a new form of clickbait.

Gossip Cop is also committed to holding publications accountable over time. That means not only busting manufactured claims when they initially surface, but also revisiting them later to show how time itself has proven these celebrity rumors were untrue. It is one thing to report Gwen Stefani is not pregnant. But when she’s still not pregnant 12 months later, it becomes abundantly clear just how wrong the original story was.

Celebrity rumors may not be going away, but neither is Gossip Cop. We will continue to fact-check day in and day out.